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He Wanted Some Alone Time

Christopher Knight crept off into a Maine forest sometime in 1986. He avoided human contact for three decades, stealing food and supplies. Stefan Beck reviews “The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit” by Michael Finkel.

By

Stefan Beck

March 21, 2017 6:58 p.m. ET

‘Probably the best thing to do,” counseled the navigation section of the Boy Scout Handbook’s 1940 edition, “is not to get lost.”

Not everyone agrees. For some, the temptation to cast off the strictures of civilization by fleeing indefinitely into the woods, the desert or the mountains is intoxicating. “People have sought out solitary existences,” Michael Finkel writes, “at all times across all cultures.” Hermits are mentioned in “Chinese texts etched on animal bones” and in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates back some 4,000...